You can remove all advertising for candy and fast food and most people will still not lose any weight. At best you'll prevent new obesity cases by a tiny margin.
When actively trying to lose weight, the body and mind resist. Partially because change is hard, partially because you're running your bodies on fewer calories on purpose. There is the ever present feeling of "I could go for a quick snack but I really really shouldn't".
I don't believe there will ever be this One Secret Trick That Doctors Hate to losing weight (except for getting dangerously ill, perhaps). However, if research like this can lead to ways to reduce some of the symptoms of cutting calories, I think the world might become a lot healthier.
There is also always the risk of this being exploited, of course; I'd imagine some less than humane leaders would be all to pleased if their working populace wouldn't be complaining about hunger all the time. The brain exhibits this behaviour for a reason, probably a good one, and surpressing it willy-nilly can only end in disaster.
Well, people who lack willpower still want to solve their weight problem. They can't use willpower because they don't have it. This is why they look for secret tricks.
Not so complicated.
The problem isn't usually quantity of food, but quality. Having 5 pre-packaged, healthy, low GI meals delivered makes it quite easy to follow the diet. Also, you don't even have to reduce calorie intake in the beginning: feel free to order 2500-3000 calorie option, if you so wish. You won't be losing any weight on that, but at least your metabolism, your glucose levels will stabilize. Then, after 2-3 weeks adjustment period, change your calorie intake to 1500 calories and continue for another month or two - the results are almost magical.
I imagine it would be expensive, but only as expensive as food and delivery of it, and would reduce much more expensive health care costs, right?
Another big issue is condiments. It's really easy to add a few tbsp of dressing to an otherwise healthy meal, which can add a few hundred "hidden" calories.
And it's definitely easier to feel satisfied off low cal food if it's nutritious - smoothies with protein powder and greens? Filling and diet friendly (esp if no milk). Water? Low cal, but you'll definitely still feel cravings.
Looking for easy solutions is very understandable, re: the original topic.
I doubt very many people make a deliberate conscious decision to gain excessive amounts of weight, especially if they're dieting. You can argue that people should be making a conscious decision to navigate the labyrinth of data, misinformation, scammers, etc to try to learn what they actually need to do to lose weight successfully but I think most people just eat what they like best from what's available when they feel like eating and are more often than not surprised at the weight they gain. Even animals in research labs on strictly controlled diets who have had the same food intake and lifestyle for decades have been unexpectedly gaining weight.
I think it's safe to say that there's a lot more going on with weight gain than lazy people making a conscious decision to be fat and a lot more involved in losing that weight. Anyone can starve themselves, but loosing weight while staying healthy isn't always so simple. Changing a person's habits and lifestyles aren't always simple either. If medications can help, people should absolutely use them.
2. Why is it wrong to solve problems the easy way? Why should people have to follow the "difficult" path of dieting if an easier method exists? That's not being lazy, it's being smart by avoiding unnecessary effort.
3. Many diets also have side effects (e.g. hunger, fatigue). But regardless, if people would rather experience side effects from medication than go through the difficult experience of dieting, why is that wrong?
2. It isn’t wrong in every situation, just in this particular one the motivating factor is lack of willpower, prioritization and education. There isn’t an “easy way” as of right now. If one comes along it will also likely carry side effects
3. Its usually ill-informed because the difficulty of dieting is a known one and steps can be taken to alleviate or bypass these issues. Usually medication with outsized effects have proportional side-effects. And we don’t always know what they are. I don’t leave out the possibility that someone could invent a pill that causes huge weight loss with little side-effects, but I would bet a lot of money against it
I encourage you to examine the implicit judgement and bias within this statement. When you say "self inflicted," are you suggesting that people should simply exercise willpower and change their behaviors? What if they cannot, either because they do not know how, or because there are related psychological problems intersecting with their weight issues?
Is depression self-inflicted? What about depressive eating patterns, resulting in weight gain? We know that being overweight is almost universally disliked. We know that most people expend great amounts of time and money on ineffective solutions.
Saying "it's self inflicted" ignores that most overweight people are not able to solve their eating disorder. It's inaccurate, in exactly the same way that it would be inaccurate to dismiss depression as "self-inflicted." Food is tied to very deep motivators within the human brain. Empirically we can very clearly see that most people are not capable of resolving these issues on their own. Generally speaking, it's a symptom of a psychological disorder.
I still think it’s helpful for people to know that their weight issues are usually fixable as long as they have the determination and desire, there’s people that do this every day and share their journey
Hey, have a good one!
Both cancer and weight loss are filled to the brim with pills that do absolutely nothing.
Thousands of expensive treatments, no cure (for cancer at least, I believe the weight loss pill industry os 100% fraudulent).
Saw some pill adverts the other day at a restaurant as the tv played. The pill promised to help lose weight without diet or exercise.
At the end of the commercial it was explicitly stated it workwd if used in conjunction with diet and exercise.
This is what the US has become.
Immunotherapy is pretty damn close to a cure, with very few side-effects. It costs a couple of hundred quid a session to administer, which of course costs the patient nothing.
Right now this is what's going on. My best friend John lives with his grandmother Connie who raised him. Last November, so 7+months now, she found out she has lung cancer. Doesn't smoke, but that doesn't matter.
Connie is the sweetest woman and reminds me of my Grandma. Not a mean bone in her body, would do anything for you.
She had to wait ~4 months to get the referral from her doctor. Once she had that she could begin oncology.
3 months later she still can't get an appointment. Connie has tried and called repeatedly, as has John and his other family members.
They are broken watching her waste away, and she can't even get in to begin assessment much less treatment.
So tired of people with statistics which can be and are gamed, or people with money and insurance assuming everyone does.
Connie is going to die, she knows this, and her last few months are nothing but terror and frustration and sadness all around.
Original comment+My 3 family members who died to cancer. Being in the cancer wards and oncology centers and getting to know lots of patients.
This is the reality. If you have money and insurance cancer will break you. If you have nothing it is almost a guaranteed death sentence.
But hey, you've got a statistic!
Cancer isn't trivial to treat, people are going to die from it. Just, less people in America compared to other countries.
You're basically saying "Well I know people that died from this very lethal disease here in the US, therefore other countries must be so much further ahead". Which isn't really logically coherent.
Yeah that sucks, but your experience doesn't define the broader landscape.
I had a sister with cancer, and we were very, very poor when she was diagnosed. She still managed to get treatment and make a full recovery, albeit we did end up with a good deal of medical debt. Nonetheless, she lived.
Why does your anecdote carry more weight than mine? It doesn't. I understand you're going through a very difficult time but the solution is not to deny statistics and established facts in favor of your poor experience. People die, it sounds like your family is genetically predisposed to lethal cancers.
Like, most people in this discussion would not think of mental-health therapy as a diet plan, but if you're thinking in terms of the systems involved then that seems more likely to generate more weight loss than any fad diet over a long run.
It's just really tempting to be reductive.
Absolutely.
"Just eat less" is not a viable strategy for a parent working 60-70 hours per week who needs to eat a high calorie diet, among other unhealthy practices, just to stay barely functional to support their family.
Or someone who is so exhausted by their work just to keep a roof over their head that they have no mental energy to think about shopping for different food, preparing it, and so on.
Eating a high-calorie diet is not unhealthy.
I think it's probably the other way around: you fix your diet first, and mental health will improve as a result.
I developed a healthy diet and healthy habits, and was able to get down to a healthy weight.. but staying there required a constant influx of willpower. If I only ate enough food to stay at a low weight, I was hungry all the time. (Eventually I ballooned back out, although now I'm losing weight again since I've realized that Morbid Obesity is no place for old men)
I think there is a systems issue at work. My body is just calibrated to hog food until it gets pretty fat, and then it'll stay there unless I do something out of the ordinary.
Telling fat people to get their shit together can work, the same way telling poor people to learn to code works. (I don't think that thin people are thin because they're hungry all the time and they overpower those urges, the same way poor people aren't necessarily all bad people who piss away all their money)
There's a lot we don't know. But it definitely does appear that a lot of obese people have some sort of homeostatic miscalibration on where their body's set point is for weight. The mechanisms involved there are numerous and complex. It's quite possible that there's something simple going on that could be adjusted in the future to get a person's weight set point down, and from there it's quite likely that they will be able to autoregulate. Conversely, it's really hard for any intervention to succeed long-term when a person's weight doesn't match this internal set point.
Possibly leftovers of a highly adaptive mechanism that let some of their ancestors survive times of extreme famine?
However, I don't think it is genetics can explain why the obesity rate has exploded in recent decades.
Seeing friends and family members that are overweight, they tend to have some similar habits. They consume a lot of liquid calories, ie sodas, fruit juice, sugar in coffee etc. They also eat calorie dense foods, ie ranch dressing, fast food, cookies while consuming fewer fruits and vegetables. They also tend to not consume as much protein and are usually fairly sedentary.
I don't think blaming individuals does much good, but at the same time I don't think some people are just doomed to be fat. If everyone around you is eating healthy non calorie dense food and walking a lot you probably will too. Conversely if everyone around you is eating high quantities of processed food while being sedentary you probably will too.
You just need to eat nutritiously dense, high fiber foods that have low caloric density to fill you up.
So a diet heavy in vegetables and whole foods would keep you full without keeping you at a heavier weight.
This would allow you to maintain a caloric deficit to get to your goal weight without going hungry, and once you get to your goal weight you can just reintroduce other foods that are more calorically dense if you'd like.
There's a subreddit filled with examples of this kinda thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/Volumeeating/
I'll check that out for sure.. right now I'm in the honeymoon phase of dieting, where I can lose weight by just switching from sugary soda to sparkling water and staying away from American restaurants
Properly balancing caloric efficiency at a young age is probably far more effective long term and honestly likely more pragmatic.